


a long hard ride

by CycloneRachel



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Mentions of other characters - Freeform, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26606824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CycloneRachel/pseuds/CycloneRachel
Summary: In which Brainy contemplates going home.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	a long hard ride

For years, Querl was unsure that he had a home.

Of course, in one way he did- he knew where he lived, in which city, on which planet. He knew his address, knew his parents and family name and ancestors. There was no way he could have been unaware of such things, as they were facts, objective. He couldn’t have debated them, they simply existed, and that was all there was for him at the time.

But subjectively, if he were asked to define what “home” meant for him? If he listened to others tell him what they thought it meant, and then they asked him the same thing (as improbable as that was, for Coluans, and because nobody would have engaged him in such a conversation anyway)?

He wasn’t sure he would have an answer, and he may have found himself unable to identify or agree with the answers of those others- if not because of his family, then certainly because of his inhibitors.

Because of them (never “thanks to”), he was literally disconnected from the rest of his people, both the ones that lived on in the collective, and those who merely spent some of their time there- cut off from sharing any information with them, and receiving any information himself. Even though he was a twelfth-level intellect, and his mother especially ensured he would grow up to fully become one, such a quality was still muted, and he was even more isolated than he already had been as a child.

Among Coluans, on the planet that was his birthplace, he was adrift, and alone.

Homeless, in the place he should have called a home, because of what he had done, and his mother’s bloodline, and his father’s fear of what he could do in the future.

And even after leaving Colu, his family’s reputation followed him. The consequences of one family trip hung over him like a perpetual stormcloud for far longer than he expected them to, and he still wore the inhibitors years later when his father sent him to the Time Institute- when he was arrested because he was careless about an experiment that endangered the lives of people who hated him anyway.

When a representative of a freshly-founded group called the Legion came to his prison cell, and promised to help him, if he used his intelligence for good- give him a new home, and maybe even a new family.

Not that he believed them, at first. He thought it was a trick, just something to make him feel better when they had no intention to fulfill their promises. If he was lucky, he was just going to be used by them, nothing but their mission control or technology expert.

And if he wasn’t? Well… he could expect, at some point, to be thrown back in jail with only his useless false hopes for company.

But somehow, the Legion had surpassed his expectations. Somehow, they were able to see past his family name, look beyond his inhibitors, and welcome him in not as a former criminal, or the Brainiac heir, but as someone who could be their friend and a future hero.

And somehow, against all odds, he did become their friend. Soon, it didn’t matter that he was homeless on Colu- he found something even better on Earth, in what would become the Legion headquarters. With them, he was even able to stand up to his mother, and what she had tried to do to him, and after that he grew even closer to his new friends.

(By the time he left them, albeit- as he thought- temporarily, he could even consider them family)

(The interesting thing about that situation was that, in contrast with every other place he had lived, he didn’t want to leave- but he had to, and so did Mon-El and Imra and the other Legionnaires who had gotten sick. He hoped, at the time, that there would be nothing wrong with the plan- he would get to wake up first, present it to Supergirl, and she and her compatriots, along with himself and his own, would come to an agreement. They would kill Pestilence, knowing that they had to, and the Blight would be stopped, and the other Legionnaires and everyone and everything else that had been infected with the Blight in the thirty-first century would be saved- would have never gotten sick in the first place.)

(However, nothing had gone as planned, and even after defeating the Blight, nothing was the same for Querl either.)

There were many times, during his first stay in the twenty-first century, that he wanted to go home- where “home” was now his own time, with the Legion, where he wasn’t being outclassed by humans who knew more about their technology simply because they had always known it. But when he finally did, and when he returned to what anyone else might consider his first home, with the Legion, he found that nothing was the same, and it hardly felt like home at all.

In a strange way, that made him accept his fate- returning to the twenty-first century, leaving the future in the hands of the man who had been his rival when they’d worked together, before he learned Winn’s true potential. And he did just that, learning more about his new (hopefully temporary) home century and about himself than he had expected when he was first awoken there after Supergirl had fallen into a coma.

(It didn’t replace the Legion, of course. Nothing could. But it made things more bearable, which was more than he could have asked for, and when the alternative was facing a pandemic… it was enough.)

And while it had been so many years since his inhibitors had been placed on him, enough that he could have almost seen them as just another facial feature, something that had always been present… the arrival of his doppelgangers did lead him to begin thinking about another home. One that he could have had, just like they did, if he hadn’t been such a selfish child, if he hadn’t been born a Dox or a Brainiac. Surely they grew up on Colu being more accepted, and more acceptable. Surely they were able to join the collective, become one with the Big Brain like he should have been. They could actually call Colu their home, more than just a home planet, while he was nothing more than a stray.

It wasn’t the only reason he’d taken off his inhibitors. But it was one of them, and he began to consider it more especially after receiving the memories of his doppelgangers, once they gave their life projectors to him.

Winn, as well, began to make Querl consider alternatives to his current path- when, after their first talk alone, Querl asked him.

“Did you do it?” he’d said, waiting for any answer, after Winn had alluded to stopping his cousin. “Is the future safe?”

Winn gave him that gentle smile again, the one Querl couldn’t tell him how much he appreciated, and said, “Yes. You can go home now, Brainy- whenever you’re ready.”

Querl had smiled back, and Winn had hugged him, but the truth was then that he wasn’t ready. He still had one more thing to do- the thirty-first century could wait, just a little bit longer.

(And, months later as Querl sat against a column in the Leviathan ship, breathing his last as he held his doppelganger’s hand, he knew that he was, truly, going to be at peace, in a place he could now call home)

**Author's Note:**

> god. I knew I wanted to write something today, because September 22 is recognized as Supergirl's birthday by DC (according to a calendar from 1976) and I wasn't sure what. And then the news about the show ending hit, and I decided to do something angsty, to let all my feelings out.  
> Anyway, I wrote a whole essay about this when the 100th episode aired, but this show has meant so much to me (for one it was a bright spot in my life when I was in college, and it partially got me into writing again) and I'll be so sad to see it go. I hope the last season is incredible, and I'll be supporting the cast and crew wherever they go next. Thank you to the show and anyone reading this, and know that I will definitely be writing more in this universe.


End file.
